How to Convince Your Boyfriend to Watch More Gilmore Girls

“I’m sorry. I can’t. Don’t hate me.” That was essentially what my husband said to me (though not via Post-It) after he tried and failed to watch an episode of Gilmore Girls. I had been a fan of the series back when I was a teenager, and after the show finally arrived on Netflix last fall, I started binge-watching it all over again when I came down with a particularly bad bout of the flu. After my husband saw me consuming episode after episode, he decided to sit down and give it a try. It took only about 10 minutes before he got up from the couch and left.

While the series has always enjoyed a fiercely loyal fan base—so much so that Netflix recently announced it’s reviving the show next year—Gilmore Girls has never been able to find much of a male following. To start, the premise isn’t exactly relatable to men. After all, the heart of the show is the relationship between Lorelai, a single mom who got pregnant at 16, and her intelligent and levelheaded teenage daughter, Rory. The cute, alliterative title of the series, of course, does nothing to help its case, either. The sad truth is, while a woman can easily say she’s a fan of Mad Men, most guys don’t admit they’re obsessed with Gilmore Girls. (That same unfortunate logic applies to other shows with overtly feminine names, such as the law drama The Good Wife, which is so criminally underrated that I almost wish the creators had gone with a different name.) Gilmore Girls’s theme song is also so sappy, even I cringe when I hear Carole King’s “Where You Lead.” It’s no wonder my husband dedicated only 10 minutes to the show.

Kevin T. Porter and Demi Adejuyigbe, who created the popular podcast Gilmore Guys, are doing their part to correct the show’s fan base gender imbalance. Twice a week, Porter and Adejuyigbe discuss one episode of the show in painstaking detail. While Porter had watched the show when it originally aired on The WB, Adejuyigbe hadn’t even seen one episode of the series until he started working on the podcast. He agreed to cohost after he saw a tweet from Porter asking for a partner for his Gilmore Guys idea. “It sounded like it would be fun, but really it could’ve been any show,” Adejuyigbe said. “[Gilmore Girls] was not something that I would have ever thought to watch, but I’m glad I did. It’s a show that I now recommend people check out. There’s a lot of merit to it.”

So far, Gilmore Guys has taped more than 126 episodes and has hosted live events in several cities. “We did a live podcast episode in San Francisco last week,” Porter said, “and there was a guy that came out and said to us, ‘Thanks so much for making this.’ ” As their popularity grew, more and more male fans of the series started to come out of hiding. “I don’t know if we’re bringing anyone out of the Gilmore Girls closet,” Porter said, “but I think it’s cool and helpful for them to have a place to go and talk about this show.”

As the unofficial male spokesmen of a female-adored show, how do these two justify their fandom of Gilmore Girls to other men? Porter, clearly a lifelong defender of the series, believes the key to converting a non–Gilmore Guy into a fan is to throw some reference points his way. “You say it kind of has the small-town weirdness of a Northern Exposure or a Twin Peaks,” he said. “Or it’s less One Tree Hill and more Aaron Sorkin—there are so many parallels between [creator] Amy Sherman-Palladino’s style and Aaron Sorkin’s style.”

He’s not wrong. If your boyfriend/husband/guy friend was at one point a fan of The West Wing or Sports Night, he could definitely appreciate the equally fast-talking, fast-walking nature of Sherman-Palladino’s Gilmore Girls. These women, who are whip smart and know how to deliver a punch line, would have no trouble fitting into any Sorkinian scenario—except they are probably too feminist to ever put up with that signature Sorkin sexism.

The show’s pop culture–filled dialogue and weird cast of characters also recall the equally offbeat and joke-dense 30 Rock. Sherman-Palladino would include such a quantity of references in each episode that Gilmore Guys has a dedicated segment, “Pop Goes the Culture,” that super-cuts all of the references found in a single episode. (A sample selection includes allusions to Charlotte’s Web, The Art of War, Cheech and Chong, Heathers, Korn, Rain Man, Rolling Stone magazine, Spice Girls, Stuart Little, and Tattoo from Fantasy Island. All in one episode.)

One of the personal defenses I use for Gilmore Girls was the fact that it consistently featured a roster of powerful and successful guest stars. Former Secretary of State Madeleine Albright appeared in one of Rory’s dreams. Sonic Youth’s Kim Gordon played a musician auditioning to be the town troubadour. Norman Mailer had a cameo as a patron who enjoyed having lunch at Lorelai’s inn, and international correspondent Christiane Amanpour stopped by for the series finale.

But the easiest way to sell Gilmore Girls to a guy is actually to point out the show’s male protagonist, Luke Danes. Luke is an alpha bro: He drinks beer, wears his cap backwards, and has probably worn the same pair of jeans since 1992. He owns a diner, but is also an excellent carpenter (he constantly fixes doors and windows, free of charge). At first, like most men, Luke couldn’t stand Lorelai’s loud, frenetic chatter—not to mention her insatiable addiction to coffee. But over the years, they develop a close friendship, and, eventually, Luke falls in love with Lorelai. If other men were to give Gilmore Girls more than a 10-minute chance, I guarantee the same thing would happen to them as well.